Could we get a site to loook at? I copied the HTMl/CSS to a file to look at but really it doesn't help paint the picture. If I could look at what you were describing I could help more. You saying "isn't" doing the trick is vague, and I don't even have enough code to possibly make a guess.

It's not really practical to require us to download things and rebuild the page so that we can help you ... unless someone is feeling especially generous. But I don't have the time. Anyhow, I hope you find a solution!

As said, we really need to see it live/complete to weigh in for anything meaninful... but it sounds like you're just bloating out the page with scripting for nothing of value... and, well... good lord...

#page > div {
display:none;
position: absolute;

WHY would you EVER apo every div inside #page -- even with the selector that's just asking for the page to break. That makes it sound like you're building the page with nothing in flow; how are you getting the height then?

APO (absolute positioning) can be very powerful for simple effects, but using it to build your entire layout (which is what it looks like you are doing) is just ASKING for the page to not work right... that it also looks like you're doing scripted show/hide with no scripting off degradation likely isn't helping matters.

In the book, they mention its so that the pages can be stack like cards and transition between pages. Here's their code archive which does the same.

In other words another reason most of the sitepoint books do more damage than harm... gotcha.

Such nonsense pretty well pissing all over maintainability and accessibility. My advice, forget anything they're telling you there as I've not seen code that bad since the last time I dealt with something built in frontpage. "transition between pages" being geekspeak for "gee ain't it neat" animooted nonsense that does nothing more than RUIN actually using the site in a meaningful manner.

But to keep that in perspective, I say that about 99% of the garbage vomited up by people using jquery.

You can position an element to be relative inside of an absolute parent, but why would you? Honestly curious. That's a weird combination.

I don't think the SP books are that bad to be honest. Sure it's not the greatest in the world, and can get out of date pretty fast, but it's a good learning source. My brother had a copy of one of them when he was trying to learn more about this stuff.

Okay... finally found the answer to the problem. Its actually the display:none and display:block, that was applied to the pages. The cascading effect of display: block caused the carousel's positioning display list style instead of side-by-side.

Instead of display:none, I use visibility:hidden, height: 0, overflow: hidden. Then I just reverse it when the page displays.

Display:block doesn't cascade, unless you mean that your CSS was so "general" that it applied to the display lists as well, aka you wrote the rule in your CSS. THe display lists style by default makes it vertical.